Category Archives: Gun Ownership

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This story seems to come a bit out of nowhere: Nothing seemed to prompt it and it rleates to an incident that happened decades ago. But, since Beau is the son of ¿Quién es más macho? Lloyd Bridges, and we’re talking about this topic, I thought I’d point you to it.

“Many years ago … I got held up at a little coffee shop in Los Angeles. … The guy ended up shooting someone in the restaurant in the leg. … I ran out and called the cops. They got the guy… That just gave me another reason to understand that we have to understand the power of guns, and make sure they don’t get into the wrong people’s hands.”

There is an interesting interview with Paul Barrett, author of Glock: The Rise of America’s Gun, published here. What I find most interesting about it is the way gun owners as a group are characterized. At several moments in time, private ownership of Glock pistols increased significantly for reasons that one would normally find explaining the behavior of toddlers, or dogs, or monkeys in an experimental setting, not sentient adult humans. For instance, the cops start using Glocks, and gun owners automatically want to use what the cops use. Or, a made up fictional Glock (the Glock 7) is described in a Lethal Weapon movie, where everything about it is wrong (remember, it’s fictional) and this enrages gun owners who run out and buy Glocks. And so on and so forth.

Now, one of the things that seems to rive Glock sales is the fact that they have been used in an increasingly larger number of tragic and horrific massacres on American soil. Somehow, the association with angry carnage and hateful violence makes American gun owners want one.

Glocks hold more ammo than other pistols, can be fitted with super-large ammo holders, and have a trigger that is very smooth making it easier for untalented amateurs to be better shots. Glocks should be banned.

One year ago today, nine-year-old Christina-Taylor Green was shot to death by Tuscon resident Jared Lee Loughner, using a 9 mm Glock automatic pistol with a high capacity ammunition clip. Seventeen other people were shot in that incident, a total of six of whom died. One of the injured was Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle “Gabby” Giffords, whom had already been “targeted” for removal by radical elements of the Republican Party. It is not clear that Loughner was acting as an agent of these radical elements, but it was widely thought at the time that his decision to attempt an assassination of the congresswoman was spurred on by the hateful and violent rhetoric, often laced with references to firearms, of the Tea Party Movement.

It’s a meme* Since the police will not arrive at your home to protect you from intruders, you must arm yourself with guns. Efforts by commie libruls to restrict gun ownership are tantamount to going from farm to farm and shooting all the babies in the head because gun control takes away the ability of hard working farm families to protect themselves from daily threats of armed intruders, who have probably gone out to the country side from their rat infested urban lairs to prey on the innocent. Central to this meme is the idea that the police a) won’t arrive at your home for a very long time after you’ve called them and b) the police are not even required to go to your home if you call them. (I’ll deal with the first, but not second of these here.) The outcome of the ‘logic’ that uses this meme is that we must heavily arm ourselves pretty much no matter where we live. The meme is fed by occasional reports of very long response times by police, such as this one recently discussed here. Continue reading →

In relation to an ongoing conversation (here) about whether or not a bullet fired up into the air can kill or maim you, we have this editorial concerning an actual (possible) case:

Too many guns. How many is too much? Well, we might start with the nameless half-wit somewhere in Ruskin last weekend who thought it would be fun to shoot off some celebratory gunfire on New Year’s Eve.

A 12-year-old boy, Diego Duran, was on the bloody receiving end of all the revelry. Duran, a popular student at Beth Shields Middle School, was simply trying to enjoy the New Year’s fireworks with his family until the errant bullet struck the top of his head.

The devastating shot could have come from as far as several miles away. The goober shooter might not even know what he or she did. But the Duran family sure knows.

The National Rifle Association insists that unmitigated stupidity and unchecked use of deadly weapons shall not be infringed. They call it the Second Amendment, I call it an assault on the American People. Perhaps when Jahmesha McMillan and Treka MacMillan recover from their wounds, they can join in that discussio . Jasmine Thar, though, is dead and won’t be able to. And her only crime was standing in her driveway with her family, about to leave on a trip to the nearby beach.

That’s when James Blackwell, gun nut, was cleaning his high powered rifle, or so he says, across the street, and accidentally discharged, or so it is assumed, a single round which passed through the bodies of all three aforementioned victims.

But really, this was not an accident. It is not an accident that people unable to safely clean a gun own very dangerous weapons and are allowed to play with them in populated areas. That is quite intentional. The NRA has taken down another American Citizen.

Some would suggest that American gun violence is an intractable scourge, with obstacles to progress that are just too high and too numerous. The American people don’t believe that, not for a minute. There is no better time to make that clear than January 8, 2012, the first anniversary of the Tucson shooting.

We urge people across this nation, in cities, suburbs and small towns, to join with the Brady Campaign, and many others on that day, to stand as one to remember the victims of American gun violence and to say, with one simple act, that we will no longer tolerate the relentless loss of innocent lives to gunfire.

That simple act is to light a candle. Join us by participating in a nationwide candlelight vigil, to proclaim that there have been too many victims of gun violence for our nation to endure.

As reported here, “Paul Klunzer’s four-month relationship with a 13 year-old girl ended like many of these illegal relationships do: with his roommate shooting at a mouse with a handgun, missing, hitting a third roommate in the chest, and having police find the girl hiding in a closet in the course of the investigation.”

If we didn’t have a Second Amendment in the United States, we would still have firearms and people could still own guns, and hunt, and do all that other fun stuff. But we wouldn’t have what amounts to a religious proscription against doing anything smart when it comes to firearms. Continue reading →

The Cook County Sheriff said the man who opened fire Thursday in a courthouse in Grand Marais got the gun from his own vehicle.

Daniel Schlienz was convicted on a sexual assault charge in Cook County Court. After the jury found him guilty of criminal sexual conduct, he left the building then came back into the courthouse and into County Attorney Timothy Scannell’s office with the loaded weapon.

He then shot a witness i his trial, the county attorney, and injured a bailiff. Fortunately, he was an incompitent marksman so no one was killed.

I do not yet know if he had a carry permit, or was using it legally, but certainly despite the best efforts of the NRA it is still not legal to carry a weapon into a courthouse.

This is obviously a matter of mental illness. What gun advocates often do not admit, however, is this: It is exactly the the intersection between lax or permissive gun laws and mental illness that facilitates this kind of event. Stricter gun regulation is needed exactly because of this intersection, not the opposite.

A 10 month old baby, two young children, and one adult were murdered by a gun toting Illinoian, who then killed him/her self. I would like to suggest that this household should not have had firearms in it. The children were not part of the argument that led to this carnage.

This is cute for two reasons. First, we seem to have a dog who is sympathetic to the ducks, possibly in cahoots with them, who helps arrange for the attempted assassination of a duck hunter. Second, the story is told by the hunter himself on an internet forum…

…I set my double barrel in the decoy box, walked around the front of the boat to get a better angle to push it out of the weeds and just as I had turned to cross the front of the boat and ( in case you haven’t guessed) Boom, the gun goes off. I looked back and the dog had climbed over the side and stepped on the trigger. About a half second later I realized I had been shot. I fell down backwards in the water…

Of all of the lobbying organizations that feed off fear, and rely for their funding and power on dividing Americans, one of the worst is the National Rifle Association.

The NRA never misses a chance to misrepresent the positions of people who advocate reasonable gun control, to make Americans afraid that the government wants to take away their right to defend their homes and their loved ones, and to turn any attempt to have a sensible conversation about guns into an assault on the Second Amendment.

Why else would the NRA support a law that makes it more difficult to prevent suicides among members of the armed forces?

Most firearm deaths in Canada are suicides (over 75 per cent). Only 24 per cent are homicides. Suicides in Canada will go up if the Prime Minister isn’t careful about what he repeals.

… Suicides dropped dramatically in Canada thanks to the federal gun registry. Not only do statistics prove as much, it stands to reason that with improved gun safety comes decreased gun fatalities; with fewer tools-of-choice for suicides available, fewer suicides occur. It just makes sense.

… A home where there are firearms is five times more likely to be the scene of a suicide than a home without a gun: Canada Safety Council. The Institut national de sante publique du Québec has assessed that the coming into force of the Firearms Act is associated, on average, with a reduction of 250 suicides (and 50 homicides) each year in Canada. That’s nearly one life saved per day. …

Hunting season is starting soon or has already started in North America. I believe we are shooting the ducks now in Minnesota. Hmmm. I wonder if this is the year we call the Sheriff to report the guys who hunt illegally in the marsh by the cabin. People are a bit more safety conscious with a toddler toddling around, even though he actually presents a very small target and the marsh is a bit far away for a shotgun blast to be much of a problem.Continue reading →

Robert Duda told police that he was cleaning his gun when it accidentally went off, killing his 14 year old son. One can easily imagine a scenario where everyone would feel bad for Robert Duda, figure he had suffered enough with the loss of his son, got him some therapy, and perhaps sent flowers to be lain on young Bryan’s grave. But, that is not how things worked out, because Somerset County Sheriffs did their job.

The history books and Dr. Who have it wrong, according to the latest research.

VINCENT Van Gogh did not commit suicide but was shot by a teenager with a Wild West obsession and a faulty gun, according to a new biography.

Short of claiming that the Dutch artist never cut off his ear and never painted sunflowers, the Pulitzer Prizewinning authors of “Van Gogh: The Life” could hardly have produced a more startling revelation from their decade of research.

I have been told that if a man owns a gun and he does not secure it, and his child gets the gun and blows away his other child, that the man has suffered enough, there need be no regulation or law or investigation or charges related to his carelessness. Just let it be. He has suffered enough. His lack of regard for safety should not be punished just because it led to a death, because it makes him feel really really bad. So just drop it.Continue reading →

Chaz Ursamanno shot himself in the head demonstrating to his girlfriend that his gun was empty. And he did it twice. Barber Kurt Voelkel was shot in the ass when a customer’s pistol fell out of his pants and went up. The bullet went clear through the barber’s chair, wallet, and butt. Well, actually, it stayed in his butt. In Oklahoma, two slack jawed yokels decided to “target practice” with no idea what was beyond the trees lining the field they were shooting in. What was there was a farmer and his little nephew. The nephew got to watch as David Reed’s chest was pierced fatally with a stray bullet. Six year old Zykria Hackett of Greenwood, South Carolina, which is the stoopedest state in the US, was shot and killed by her grand-daddy’s gun while waiting to go to a pre-church breakfast. The granddaddy had stashed little Zykria and two other young children in the van and while they were waiting for him, the kids found his gun and decided to play with it. There will be no charges.